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Conservatives are individuals obsessed with the continuation of things exactly as they are, well into the foreseeable future. Almost always American, Christian, homophobes they absolutely hate every form of advancement in the human race which strangely does not include things like the internet, a device used by them to rant their awesome opinions to the general public.
Conservative values include: Everything in the Bible that they agree with (if they don't agree with it, then it's "not officially in the Bible"), general intolerance for all ethnic and social minorities, anti-abortion (also called pro-life), heavy support for the second amendment, banning alcohol, non-interventionist style government, backward Christian fundamentalism and general whining about liberals. You can identify a conservative as they are almost always, wealthy middle aged men from the Southern United States.
Conservatism in America[edit]
Conservative Americans are pretty cool guys, according to Conservative Americans. They stand for all the basic freedoms that make America great and that they aim to deter the evil forces of Liberalism, Communism, Homosexuality and Islam.
They hate Liberals for doing exactly what they could never do: Move the country in a new and positive direction. If you hear something as being "too liberal" it is usually because a Conservative is upset about a law or change that could mean a stronger and more advanced nation. If Conservatives had it their way life in America would be exactly as it was in colonial times, with people shooting each other over insults and bourbon, lynching Black people being a-ok and every law being managed by a state with zero control over its citizens.
They hate Communists because everyone is treated exactly the same, say no more. Conservatives are quick to accuse others of being communists, especially if they own something red. Extreme anti-communists will even go so far as to paint the red stripes on the American flag blue. Despite the fact is.gd/RepublicansSuck is almost 5 years old, it shows info about Republicans today.
Whether it is because gay people are different or because they got sent to jail, only to be furiously bummed by a sweaty black man, conservatives proclaim that God hates every homosexual man He created. If the Bible promoted homosexuality rather than condemning it, every Conservative would magically turn gay.
They hate Muslims because terrorists attacked America on numerous occasions. Reasonable enough to hate terrorism, but because a large proportion of these terrorists were Islamic, they have jumped to the flawless conclusion that every Muslim is a terrorist. This has gone so far as some Conservatives to suggest that perhaps they should make Islam illegal in America or deport all Muslims away from America. Remember how I told you Conservatives allegedly supported freedom? Some suggest that because they don't worship Jesus this has contributed to their hatred.
Stance on the second amendment[edit]
Conservatives love guns. Second only to their love of hating everything else, their love of guns is paramount to their existence. After several school massacres, evil liberals wished to take their guns away because it's dangerous to give any lunatic the right to bear arms. Conservatives were outraged at such an idea wishing to keep their guns as it been part of their law for many, many years. Self-defense is also a key issue on this one, as now, in the highly unlikely event of a home invasion they won't be able to mistake their loved ones for an invader. School children needlessly dying are a very small price to pay in order to keep America running as it always has been, as far as Conservatives are concerned.
Stance on the First Amendment[edit]
Conservatives like Brett Kavanaugh claim to love the First Amendment. But will they still love it if it was being used against THEM? The answer is no.
Stance on the eighteenth amendment[edit]
Alcohol promotes drunken and disorderly behavior so in the 20s America tried its hand at banning alcohol through the eighteenth amendment & The Volstead act. Far from ridding society from alcohol, all it served to do was increase the consumption of alcohol and organized crime in major American cities. Not good, safe alcohol but homemade moonshine laced with good old methanol which caused blindness, which the conservatives claimed on , insanity and death.
Many conservatives do not understand that by banning a substance you increase public awareness of it and in turn consumption of it. Despite this, many conservatives want alcohol banned from society as it is completely immoral and that God would never allow such a chemical to be consumed, despite his own son doing it with water to wine.
Sadly, conservatism has left America and can be found in other parts of the world. It is in Europe, though there it is not as strong.
The liberal party is the conservative party within Australia. The government will typically follow a 24 year cycle. The cycle begins with liberals gaining government in an absolute landslide, with the labor party getting their anuses deeply penetrated in the election. They immediately start to pay off debt, save money and scrap every law labor has passed. This will continue for 12 years until they try and pull off laws so blatantly unconstitutional that the public have no choice but to give their butts a caning and bring back the labor party.
Much like the unemployed problem gambler, the labor party takes all the hard earnt conservatives cash and spends it all. 12 years later, they are so in debt they have to get kicked out. Like all conservatives, the liberals enjoy ranting about the left wing labor party and stopping immigration the boats.
Progressivism and Liberalism are big no-nos when it comes to any conservative. A fairer and more balanced society sends communist alarm bells ringing in the mind of a conservative and they will immediately try and return to the classic 99% poor, 1% mega-rich model.
Many conservatives consider Barack Obama the worst president ever for bringing about social equity and taxing the rich, aka sharing what they have too much of.
Moving forward?[edit]
The conservative brain is constantly in the reverse gear. Just because an idea worked in the context of two hundred years ago, logically means it will suit any modern day context. It is almost certain that should Homosexuality and Atheism been an accepted thing two hundred years ago, Conservatives would be doing the exact opposite of what they do now.
It is also quite arguable that Conservatives raise arguments just to disagree with liberals, for example Climate Change denial and their persistent belief that the earth is six thousand years old, despite the endless evidence suggesting otherwise.
Blatant homophobia[edit]
Whether it's because they all had that Uncle Bobby that touched them all through their boyhood years, or they really don't like people that are different, Conservatives hate homosexuals. The bible, a tool used to teach tolerance of all people teaches Conservatives to openly hate men that lie with other men on the grounds of homosexuality makes god angry. This furthers the hypocrisy in God being tolerant of everyone that he allegedly made.
Conservatives are sometimes, themselves heavily closeted homosexuals that instead of embracing their true nature decide that if they hang around with other homophobes and participate in homophobic style bashings and protests that they will have the gay squeezed out of them.
Conservatives are in favor of just about every form of life except for: Gays, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Atheists and just about everyone that isn't a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male. Therefore they are against birth control and abortion. However they are openly in favor of bearing of arms and Capital Punishment.
Conservatives are against safe sex and thus for unwanted pregnancy and the transmission of STIs. The grounds of this baffling policy being that sex should only be exchanged between a married couple for the purposes of making a family, not between Jewish Kings and their hundreds of concubines. Teenagers and unmarried couples, so far as conservatives are concerned won't have sex. They as such push to ban condoms and the pill as wasting potential life makes god angry, despite during normal sex the millions of wasted sperm cells that are potential life also should also make God angry in theory. This would mean succubi are doing a good deed according to the strictest pro life standards by stealing teenage boys sperm as they sleep to breed an army of demons, rather than letting their seed spill pulling out like Onan.
Whoops, you're 15 years old, still living with your parents, been brutally raped and finding yourself pregnant. Hey at least you're not an animal that's been raped or living under ISIS or they would just kill you for being unclean. Conservatives think you should have to have that child and raise it lovingly, whilst any reasonable human being would see the perfectly valid argument in having an abortion and catching the bastard that did it. God is going to be mighty upset about you getting rid of that potential life that you didn't want so conservatives do the lords work on earth and push for it to illegal. Such excuses as the child not surviving, you not surviving or you just being too damn young for a child do not qualify to conservatives as they can never ever be wrong. However if your boyfriend freaks out at the idea of being a father at 16 and having to pay child support ,and hits you just hard enough, than you might luck out and get out of it in the eyes of the church and get a get out of hell free miscarriage.
Conservatives take the ye olde fables in the bible as proven fact. Rather than analyze experimental data and proven fact to make up their mind, they will blindly follow a book written two thousand years ago in a language most of them don't know how to read. The theory of evolution, the fossil record and the big bang, despite many experiments being carried out to prove them, at least from the conservative stance not enough conclusive proof has been gathered. Conservatives also use bible stories to debunk proven fact:
"Creation science asserts that the biblical account, that dinosaurs were created on day 6 of creation approximately 6,000 years ago, along with other land animals, and therefore co-existed with humans, thus debunking the Theory of Evolution and the beliefs of evolutionary scientists about the age and creation of the earth."
- ~ Conservapedia on Dinosaurs
Similarly, conservatives are "young earthers" believing the earth to be six thousand years old. Fossil and human records are not enough to debunk this idea to many conservatives as there is "not enough data to support it" (an old favorite catch phrase, in all matters scientific) irrespective of what is going on beyond the earth.
It is also strongly encouraged by conservatives to teach creationism and religion in school, instead of evolution to create an unbias world where people can think for themselves. The biggest counter argument to evolution is that it cannot explain the complexity of species. You will most certainly receive this response if you tell a conservative that that the fossil record does not support creationism and therefore evolution is correct. Other useful tips on pissing off conservatives to no end in regards to religion include:
- If carbon dating suggests the life on earth earth is millions of years old, how can they support creationism if carbon dating has been proven to be scientifically accurate?
- Is it gay to wear another man's clothes, love him more than any woman, weep in his arms and cut off two hundred Philistine foreskins from battle so you can marry his sister Michal who you don't love as much?
- Who did the sons of Adam and Eve have sex with to make six billion people on earth today; because doesn't Deuteronomy say incest is forbidden but they were the only humans?
- Want to attend my three month pregnant daughter in law Tamar's live burning for being a loose widow; you look really cold picketing abortion clinics late into the night.
- Rabbi I know tossing around the old pig skin like Flash Thompson isn't kosher, but is Kitty Pryde kissing Spider-Man unorthodox, because every creeping creature upon the ground is an abomination?
Intolerance of minorities[edit]
Whilst the intolerance of gay people is blindingly obvious, other religions, ethic minorities and immigrants hold no place in the conservative utopia. You can tell because just about republican president ever elected seeks to restrict immigration and deport all evil migrants back home. "White America is best America" said Bush.
Other religions are not allowed simply because the bible is the divine word or god, thus disproving every other religion in existence. This technique could possibly be made valid if every other religion don't present similar arguments.
Conservatives, are at heart massive patriots. But wait a minute, there is nothing wrong with loving one's country you might ask as long as it doesn't stain the flag and air dirty laundry. Maybe they do the things they do because they believe it is the right thing to do by their country. In actuality the majority of the time they will do something and then claim to have done it out of sheer patriotism, although it maybe have had nothing to do with the advancement of their country, rather their own personal agenda. They say, therefore it is.
Using this logic conservatives will try and execute just about any law or rule they want as they can then claim it was done to be patriotic. Don't like gay people? Let's make it illegal for them to get married, because thats a patriotic thing to do. Like the word of god? Lets spread his word as morally sound, because thats a patriotic thing to do. Don't want your country to move forward? Lets convince the population that those that think otherwise are crackpots, because thats a patriotic thing to do. And the list goes on.
Meanwhile things that suggest you do love your country such as health care reform or immigration reform are condemned, as being far too liberal and are completely banned within conservative circles.
- Further reading: Adolf Hitler
As communism is to the left, the right wing has Fascism. Whilst conservatives and other right wing crackpots promote the growth of business as it will in theory increase the strength of a nation, fascism is just everything executed exactly to achieve that goal. Like an enormous colony of ants self-determination is completely lost so that the country can move forward under a totalitarian dictator and absolutely no personal rights. Fascism whilst ideal to the extremely conservative individual does not work in the real world like its polar opposite of communism. Fascists generally have very nicely tailored uniforms, but don't hold a candle compared to the royalists or the church, what with those immaculate gold encrusted crowns scepters and gowns.
In short: Communism, you have equal rights. Fascism, you have no rights.


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Today I wanted to share with you this beautiful pressed back chair. I love painted press back chairs, the paint the glaze makes the beautiful design pop!
I love the look of paint and wood. So for this I taped off all the back spindles before I painted.
I then sprayed the entire chair with Valspars Peach Fuzz to a soft coral color!
After it was sprayed I used a brush to push the glaze down into the design to really make it pop!
I LOVE how this chair turned out!!
You can follow me here:

subset: commoncrawl


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This image from V1 became part of the V2 header for the T.I. site |
First off, thanks to everyone that has contacted me to volunteer for Trans Iowa V9. I have filled the Checkpoint #2 needs and half of Checkpoint #1 needs.
I would feel a little better about things if I could get a few more folks to say they would help out at Checkpoint #1. The core group I have now is experienced and has done volunteering at Trans Iowa before, so you do not need to have any special knowledge, just a desire to help out the racers in getting their name and hand them up cue sheets. Update: Looks like I'm going to be good to go on Checkpoint #1 now. I still need a few intrepid souls for the start/roll out to give a hand. You should have access to a vehicle for this. Give me a shout if you can help out.
Dropping From Trans Iowa:
Yes- I have gotten a few drops already, and it happens. I appreciate finding out if you can not come, because it helps me plan and saves me time and money by not doing the extra legwork for someone that won't be showing up. So, if you can not show up- for any reason- please let me know. I will be bummed that you will not be there, but it will help me out and prevent wasting time, money, and resources.
Probably one of the biggest question marks for new-to-gravel grinding folks is what tires to use. In Trans Iowa, it will be a different answer than it will be for the Almanzo 100, and different than what you might choose for the Dirty Kanza 200 too. Here are some thoughts on tires for you to consider, based upon my observations, experience, and knowledge of the course.
- Volume: You won't want to run tires under 32mm. If you do, you will waste energy, suffer "cutting in" to soft surfaces, and have a high risk for pinch flatting. The most popular size range for tires at Trans Iowa is anything from 35mm to 42mm wide. (Based upon a survey I once took and years of observations.) Even going this big, pinch flatting still occurs, so running even bigger rubber is okay, as long as you can get by the idea of the wheels being slightly heavier.
- Tread: You really do not need to run any tires with a deep tread pattern. File tread would work fine at Trans Iowa, but a minimalistic tread pattern tire may also have a thin casing, so be careful. Micro-knobs are probably a good bet, as is most anything I've seen on a touring tire. That should get you pointed in the right direction.
- Tubeless: I happen to like tubeless tires on Iowa gravel. It works great, essentially eliminates the possibility of a pinch flat, and has better shock absorption qualities. Downsides are the initial set up and dealing with a cold, gooey mess if you do have to stick a tube in due to a flat tire issue.
- Mud clearances: You definitely will need mud clearance at Trans Iowa. Well......there is a 95% chance you'll run into a situation where mud clearance is necessary. (I suppose there is a 5% chance it could be bone dry this Spring.) At any rate, if you show up with tires that max out your frame clearances, you may end up dealing with cleaning out a lot of muck and mire from the frame, or dealing with jammed brakes, torn up rear derailleurs, or other mud related maladies.
- Tire Pressures: You won't want to run high pressure in your tires, whatever you run. All that will do is make your bike more skittish, which you will have to spend more energy on to control. I don't know about you, but in a 325+ mile gravel road event, I would think saving any bits of energy you could would be wise. So- run a pressure that keeps the bike stable and comfortable, yet prevents pinch flats. Trust me, you will go faster with less energy expended. For example- I go about 230lbs, and run Clement MSO 40mm tires a lot. I never go over 40psi, and have run these as low as 20psi- with tubes! I probably am just as fast at 30psi as I am at 40psi, but I run a heck of a lot more smoothly. Think about that.....
Image by W. Kilburg from T.I.V8 |
That's all for this week.


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Woodstock (1970)
Directed by Michael Wadleigh
Share on
Synopsis by Dan Pavlides
This iconic musical documentary covers the three-day 1969 music festival on the property of Max Yasger's farm that symbolized the late 1960s in terms of musical, social and political ideology of the era. American audiences are introduced to Ten Years After, featuring guitar great Alvin Lee. Jimi Hendix, The Who and Joe Cocker give riveting performances. As naked flower children romp, the New York freeway is closed because of traffic congestion. Music lovers leave their cars and travel on foot only survive torrential downpours of rain, food shortages and non-stop music. Jefferson Airplane gives the wake up call with their song "Volunteers Of America." Crosby, Stills and Nash deliver a memorable performance. John Sebastian gives an impromptu set with a borrowed guitar from Tim Hardin. Santana, Sly and The Family Stone, Sha-Na-Na, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens and Joan Baez also appear. The movie did big box office business and a successful three record set sold millions of copies. The Grateful Dead, Credence Clearwater Revival and Janis Joplin performed but were not shown in the film. The Dead's Jerry Garcia recalled that it was the worst live show the band ever did, ironic for a band known for their spirited live performances.
rock-band, drugs, folk-music, hippie, mud, music, performer, protester, rock-music, songwriter
High Artistic Quality, High Historical Importance, High Production Values


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California State University, Long Beach affirms the equal worth of every individual and of distinctive groups of people, and fosters fair and equal treatment and access for all members of the university community. Therefore, the University is committed to the principles of equal opportunity in education and employment, to policies and practices that ensure equal opportunity and consideration, and to the protection of civil rights.
It is the policy of California State University, Long Beach to provide programs, services, and benefits, including employment, without regard to age, disability, gender (including gender identity, gender expression), genetic information, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, as well as Veteran Status (Executive Order 1097)
Reasonable accommodation to disability is considered a means of establishing equal opportunity.


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Mel Gibson Goes After Oksana for Contempt
Mel Gibson's lawyers have filed legal papers in their custody war, asking the judge to hold Oksana Grigorieva in contempt ... TMZ has learned.
Sources tell us the Order to Show Cause (the contempt papers) claims Oksana is responsible for leaking the secretly-recorded tapes of Mel's rants during their nuclear arguments. The judge in the custody case issued a restraining order against Oksana late last month, prohibiting her from leaking the tapes. Mel & Co. believe Oksana sold the tapes for big bucks.
We've also learned Mel's lawyers have filed legal papers asking Judge Scott Gordon to issue an order allowing them to search Oksana's computer and iPhone for emails and text messages showing communications related to the sale of the tapes. We've learned another judge has already rejected that motion, but it has now been renewed before Judge Gordon.


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Article Intro
Crime has typically converged with aspects of warfare. This symbiotic relationship further complicates the broad battle-space understanding for early warning vigilance or defensive and offensive maneuvers against nebulous networks and masked relationships of convenience or ideology. The asymmetric cyber domain platform as an adversary's tool to combat a foe unconventionally in a criminal, harassing or potentially devastating non-kinetic manner is no exception. Whether Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) cyber-attacks against the U.S. are used to achieve a military or criminal objective, their encroachment upon political, economic, social, and military networks or infrastructure requires continued insights and operational capabilities in the field to mitigate risk, ensure resiliency, and secure our Nation. This Journal article has converged technology issues, intelligence doctrine, and operational approaches to support the cyber mission and treat hostile actors as any other adversary where threats must to be predicted, identified, and countered in an innovative and decisive manner.
Entities within the U.S. cyber community are edging towards waging more of a counter-cyber-attack campaign to deal strategically and tactically with today's cyber threats over anti-cyber-attack campaigns (Menn, 2012). Anti-cyber-attack is most often associated with active and passive defensive measures used to protect systems from acts. Counter-cyber-attack assumes more pre-emptive offensive strategies to analyze signatures or behaviors and deny the adversary by preventing, deterring, preempting and neutralizing hostile acts and intrusions. This distinction is similar in theory to the anti-/counter-insurgency intelligence approach found in "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan" with regard to where collection efforts are directed and how analytical brainpower is used to improve intelligence relevancy for dealing with a particular issue (Flynn, Pottinger, & Batchelor, 2010).
While cyber defense is required when systems are attacked by single or multiple hacktivists, state sponsored hackers, cyber mercenaries, complex international, politically motivated computer crime or warfare, an aggressive offensive counter-cyber-attack posture and cyber-battlespace awareness by threat operations centers (and associated components) should be a primary task in order to effectively gain and exploit knowledge about the various contexts of operation and distinctions between cyber threat actors, their motives, methods of preparation, attack tree tactics, and intent. The approach requires a hybrid balance of intelligence, counterintelligence and operations that moves beyond analyzing information systems during or after they are attacked. The hybrid approach leverages a broad set of sources and methods to proactively collect and passively detect indicators and signals as early warning discontinuities and threats while there is room for actionable options, as opposed to reactions when options have diminished.
Intrusion Detection: From Reactive to Predictive
Modern cyber-attack warning should concentrate on the identification of indicators as early as possible to augment resilience. This will include examining the dynamic or idiosyncratic features of a future hostile situation that may affect important national interests. This focus, at strategic and tactical levels, will depend less on static potential threat conditions or reactionary responses and more on attempts to isolate the myriad of discrete precursor turning points and discontinuities to identify, track, and reduce the security threat(s). Traditionally, responses to attacks such as those described by the term Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) have focused on identifying indicators within a network to isolate and stop a campaign. Examination of the turning points prior to the launch of an attack is much less common.
Mitigating surprise by assessing such threats can require intensive, process oriented, rigorous analytical work supported by information collection, and coupled with creativity and diverse predictive outlooks. This remains true of most persistent problems that are not simply a focused impending event or responding in a reactionary manner. As such, a key resides in building a spectrum of plausible futures based on vision-based planning that blends information (All Source Intelligence), intuition, and thoughtful judgment to establish and link viable predetermined event- and wild-card scenarios to one another as broadly as possible. Specifically, scenario planning for this effort can leverage a futures warning technique used for medium to long-term strategic analysis, planning, and risk mitigation.
This methodological approach, based largely on works in Strategic Warning, Estimating and Forecasting, and Indications and Warning, can establish viable scenarios and the ability for competing hypothesis so the threat analyst can try to determine relevancy or irrelevancy as evidence of malicious or suspect indicators are identified.
Monitoring indicators across a continuum can nullify some scenarios or hypotheses and illuminate trending towards more viable potential outcomes in a more predictive manner for early warning. Techniques such as "Competing Hypothesis" (Heuer, 1999), Scenario Analysis or the introduction of War Gaming exercises are recommended. At the same time they can provide more tell-tale signs of attackers for more effective (and widely correlating) find and fix targeting objectives.
Creating the Early Threat Warning Framework
Cyber threats can be treated in the same manner as many other discrete or cloaked attacks where the primary focus as defense is on knowing the enemy- his intentions, capabilities, and motivations. Earlier Defense Intelligence Agency analytical frameworks by Cynthia Grabo (2004) and Jonathan Lockwood (1996) can contribute to early cyber threat warning and predictive threat analysis.
Preparations for both cyber and physical attacks in asymmetric conflict consider the differing capabilities and sophistication of hostile actors, the distributed social networks that enable their activities, support, and sustainment, the platform, and the messaging (direct or mediated) that resonates to the point of inciting action on the part of the actor/attacker (such as in the recurring case of Anonymous).
The following framework leverages some elements of Lockwood's 12-step Analytical Method for Prediction (LAMP); however, deep Problem Identification can be effectively assessed through the [Art of] Design framework, taught at the US Command and General Staff College School of Advanced Military Studies.
- Problem Identification: Determine the Issue
The first stage of an effective early warning is in knowing what the problem is, its drivers, and the assumptions that can be made. This requires understanding both the target of the attack and the mechanism by which it is launched. The goal may be to exfiltrate data, alter existing data, transfer money, or reduce the availability of a system. An exploit may be leveraged against identified vulnerabilities in which one can understand eminent risks, or it may be a zero-day attack, where the actual mechanism is unforeseen. In any case, the actual problem must be well-formulated and broken down into component parts so potential adversarial actors can be identified and understood. From that point, probability of intentions, capabilities, and likely actions can be established that characterize the threat to vulnerabilities of access, disruption, denials, corruption, theft, or the destruction of information resident in computers and the systems they reside on. Collecting and sharing of this information can be facilitated through government agencies as well as through industry partners through the U. S. Department of Defense's Defense Industrial Base.
2. Identifying Potential Actors
Attribution of attacks back to specific actors has been challenging. Cyber attackers with cloaked identities, proxied network connections or bulletproof hosting services, and operating bases in remote locations create clear issues for analysts in recognizing an actor and associating him with a nation state attack or a non-state individual or group. Advanced studies of how each potential actor identifies and perceives the opportunity for attack is performed by issuing full spectrum collection operations against the threat activities, plans, and intentions.
Cyber profiling through social media analysis (and Cyber-HUMINT/CI) can play a critical role in the advance appreciation of foreign influence and strategic messaging from the standpoint of being able to better assess the messenger, message, and intended audience. To this point, warnings and signals of individual participation in social media based on profile of communication and performance traits, the resources they have available, the methods they would use, objectives, and their motivation (gun, bullets, and trigger model) add to the datum pointing towards particular scenarios. This may include:
- Map of the potentially hostile environment.
- Identifying individuals or groups that require monitoring and vigilance.
- Developing a prioritized list of future targets.
- Prioritize the importance and impact capabilities of these actors as threats for collection management purposes and risk evaluation.
- Identifying the actor threats that will likely have access through direct tasking or ideology for a potential Insider Threat.
3. Actor Courses of Action: Viability and Probability
Cyber-attack progression typically follows a "kill chain" cycle as published by Cloppert in 2009. The various phase-gates that occur (in both linear and parallel flows) can be predetermined in many cases towards the eminent attack. Issues which occur to the far left of the kill chain in the Reconnaissance and Weaponization phases, have been difficult to observe, whereas events that occur to the right and start at the Delivery phase can be more easily identified and analyzed because evidence resides on the systems that have been compromised. While it is challenging, identification of actors by their activity in the far left of the chain can lead to an effective countermeasure before an attack occurs—particularly where illicit finance is concerned as inducement, and follow-the-money ("FININT" Financial Intelligence and Counter Threat Finance) procedures can be implemented.
Cloppert's Advanced Persistent Threat Kill Chain (2009)
4. Determine Scenario Enablement
Adversaries have proclivities towards computer resources and methods according to their preferences, style or training, and resources at their disposal. By understanding their tendencies and technological capabilities or limitations, which can be collected, the adversary can be exploited to the point of understanding intent, motivation, and capabilities. This becomes increasingly complex when actors function in teams to expand their capabilities. This is useful in cyber-attacks, because the skills used to successfully launch an intrusion into a network are different than those used to move laterally through a system and exfiltrate data.
In the cyber community many of these data points can be identified by pre-determined patterns and signals in behavior or emotionally driven sequences. In other cases where they cannot be pre-determined, they can be collected, and therefore should be monitored, tracked, recorded for groups and particular adversary profiles to draw inferences and future intelligence driven responses. This may involve monitoring the activity on specific areas of the Internet such as Internet Chat Relays (IRCs), 4chan.org, Pastebin, etc.
5. Manifested Scenario Focal Events
With no real boundaries established on the Internet, guarding cyber borders from attacks requires conceived multi-layers of defense to implement detection systems that are honed to identify clusters of activities that identify patterns of behavior that show a targeted objective (or mission) is underway. One-off activities may not be a strong indicator of a future cyber-attack and the activities might go unnoticed. When activities, attack points, and methods are clustered together, a pattern can be identified and analyzed resulting in predictive behavior. The defense system must be able to identify an active kill chain "Focal Event" in its early stages to break the event flows to thwart an attack from progressing and identify the attacker or their technique footprint to defend against subsequent occurrences.
6. Create Focal Event Indicators: An adversary prepares for hostilities
Indicators can be catalogued and classified a number of ways that correlate to the observable tactics, techniques, and procedures followed as an attacker progresses towards his end state Focal Event objective of the assault. These pieces of data can demonstrate the presence of activity despite the fact that they may not exclusively represent only activity conducted by the adversary and their sole signature. When combined with behavior, the indicators trend towards a profile.
7. Collect and Monitor through Indicators: Assess Emerging Trends
Analyst teams will collect and monitor identified activities or circumstances that are part of the Cyber Threat actor's modus operandi that correlate as indicators. The indicators may not equate to an actual foreign probe, collection, or attack threat; they can act as a signal to the scenarios and to a general evolution of an occurrence. As the number of indicators in a given situation progress they likely warrant further investigation or collection tasking.
8. Discern the Probable Scenario that is Trending
As indicators point to a particular scenario manifestation, the scenario(s) can be reassessed and further exploited to determine that the development and necessary attributed actions are considered for viability. It is critical at this stage that data analytics are being used to sort through vast amounts of sensor data that may be coming in. The cyber domain as a vast sea will overwhelm integrated multi-source intelligence feeds if they have not been calibrated to detect specific and relevant data points in the system of processing, exploiting, and disseminating (PED process).
9. Readjust for New Manifestations of the Scenario
Change and adjust specific scenarios and their structure elements as more threat signature information is received and analyzed towards the hypothetical solutions to reject the viability of the proposed alternatives when a more substantive alternative scenario outside of the choice set may be occurring.
10. Deception in Indicators
Early warning analysis can produce a number of valid indicators but may also capture deception indicators that have been created to throw off surprise mitigation efforts. Indicators should not just be collected but rather, they should also be monitored further in context and tested to correctly predict an adversary's next move. Further, as a counterintelligence capability, offensive deception activities should be executed to feign weaknesses or to trap the adversary.
11. Mental Model Avoidance: Is it expectation or actuality; theory or current developments?
For every development based on the present indicators, a number of options for action or inaction should be determined by evaluating the micro-situation and assessing whether the occurrence is actually part of the kill-chain flow or if it is a mental model mind-set expectation that could be a feign, false flag, anomaly, or figment of the imagination. Here the OODA Loop decision making model may be of help in examining the actuality of event according to the principals of Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
12. Strategic Options Analyzed Against Viable Scenarios
As the scenario occurrence nears fruition, strategic or tactical options can be executed. The options to be executed ideally would have been previously reviewed in an earlier Course of Action (COA) testing and Red Team analytical framework as a reality check to how the major challenge or risk could potentially unfold.
In this final stage, the pre-developed contingency plans would be executed if all efforts towards deterrence, denial, and destruction were exhausted.
Cyber threat security breaches are on the rise globally and this new face of irregular warfare by asymmetric hostile actors, both foreign and domestic, is leading many to believe that terrorists and criminal cartels could in due time recruit significant cyber armies through social media that can permeate network defenses internally and externally. However, defenses much like counter-Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) programs may be more focused towards defeating the "device" or technology, as opposed to directly engaging with the human factors and those who are motivated to use the internet as a weapon. In Flynn's paper (2010), he addresses counter-insurgency intelligence failures when intelligence lacked meaningful substance for insights or action, and when analysts could barely scrape together enough information to formulate rudimentary assessments of critical knowledge gaps.
Cyber warfare is yet another method of conducting war that requires thoughtful analysis of operationalized intelligence for offensive capabilities in tandem with our defensive abilities. In the end, policy makers and analysts should focus less on monikers of war tools/weapons associated with cyber warfare and train its collection and analysis more on the actual or viable perpetrators who either actively conduct the attack or those who motivate others than in how to build walls to prevent breaches from attackers inside and outside "the gates." Failure to do so can be seen as a wartime failure of intelligence, which can be easily averted before disaster. Cyber threat is an issue that can be collected against through aggressive intelligence, and can be predicted through analytical rigor and futures methods. By leveraging the "INT's" in a thoughtful manner towards the actual problems, offenses and defenses can be improved and adversaries can be better identified, deterred and defeated for better outcomes and mitigated surprises.
As Flynn states, "Highly complex environments require an adaptive way of thinking and operating. Just as the old rules of warfare may no longer apply, a new way of leveraging and applying the information spectrum requires substantive improvements—often in the areas of innovative strides—to constantly change our way of operating and thinking if we want to win" (2010).
Cloppert, M. (2009, October 14). "Security Intelligence: Attacking the Kill Chain." Retrieved on June 1, 2012 from the SANS website: http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/10/14/security-intelligence-attacking-the-kill-chain
Flynn, M. T., Pottinger, M., & Batchelor, P. D. (2010, January). "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan." Voice from the Field. Center for a New American Security. Washington, DC.
Grabo, C. M. (2004). Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning. University Press of America.
Heuer, R. J. (1999). "Chapter Eight: Analysis of Competing Hypothesis." Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Center for the Study of Intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency. Pp. 95-110
Lockwood, J. (1996). Lockwood Analytical Method for Prediction, DC: JMIC.
Menn, J. (2012, June 18). "Hacked companies fight cyber criminals." Retrieved on June 18, 2012 from the Canada.com website: http://www.canada.com/technology/Hacked+companies+fight+cyber+criminals/6799367/story.html
About the Author(s)
Congratulations, a very well written and easily understandable article. A must read for students of our military cyber-warfare community. The only thing I did not see clearly discussed in your article is a discussion of scale, although there are references to it. It seems to me that the execution of the first parts of the framework would require a huge investment in resources. This investment would have to occur very far in advance of a cyber "Pearl Harbor" event to be effective. I don't know if that investment is being made but my guess from the activity I see on internet is that it is not. As those hostile to the United States align themselves to do us harm our only hope is that the message you present here is accepted before it is too late.


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Physicians at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center are the first on the West Coast to perform a new, less-invasive procedure that is part of a clinical trial to help clear plaque-ridden carotid arteries. The procedure took place on March 28.
Just as arteries to the heart can become plaque-ridden and cause a blockage, so can the two carotid arteries that supply blood to the brain. Every year, more than 300,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with such a blockage and if left untreated, it can reduce or even stop blood flow to the brain, causing a potentially disabling stroke.
Current treatment options include traditional open surgery to clean out the carotid artery and a minimally-invasive alternative that uses a stent to keep the artery open. However, each option has some limitations. The traditional surgery involves a large incision along the neck and carries risk of surgical complications. The stent procedure is less invasive, but some studies have shown that it causes a higher risk of stroke than the surgical procedure.
Now, a new technique and device system is being tested called Transcarotid Stenting with Dynamic Flow Reversal, or the Silk Road Procedure. It allows physicians the ability to deliver a stent directly into the carotid artery from the neck, offering a shorter, potentially safer route than the usual method of guiding a stent from an artery in the groin, which carries a risk of plaque dislodging along the way. The loose plaque can travel via the blood and cause a blockage in an artery leading to a possible stroke.
A unique aspect of the new system is the ability to temporarily divert blood flow away from the plaque during the procedure to help ensure that the patient's brain is fully protected from plaque debris at all times. Physicians redirect blood flow from the carotid artery where the team is working into tubing set up outside the body and then back into the body via the femoral vein located near the groin.
"We're always seeking new options for patients with the ultimate goal of treating these carotid artery blockages with the least procedural risk," said Dr. Wesley Moore, UCLA study investigator and professor emeritus of vascular surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "We look forward to contributing to this important research."
Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center is one of 25 centers around the world participating in the study, called the ROADSTER trial, designed for high surgical risk patients who may be older or have especially narrowed arteries.
The study is funded by Silk Road Medical, developers of the Transcarotid Stenting with Dynamic Flow Reversal system.
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Materials provided by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Health Sciences. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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NEW YORK (AP) — CBS ordered "60 Minutes" correspondent Lara Logan and her producer to take a leave of absence Tuesday following a critical internal review of their handling of the show's October story on the Benghazi raid, based on a report on a supposed witness whose story can't be verified.
The review, by CBS News executive Al Ortiz and obtained by The Associated Press, said the "60 Minutes" team should have done a better job vetting the story that featured a security contractor who said he was at the U.S. mission in Libya the night it was attacked last year.
Questions were quickly raised about whether the man was lying — something "60 Minutes" should have better checked out before airing the story, the report said.
The report also said Logan should not have done the story in the first place after making a speech in Chicago a year ago claiming that it was a lie that America's military had tamed al-Qaida.
CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager, who is also the "60 Minutes" executive producer, said he had asked Logan and her producer, Max McClellan, to take a leave of absence of an undetermined length.
Fager said he prides himself on catching almost everything, "but this deception got through and it shouldn't have." There was no word about whether Fager will face any repercussions for his role.
"The 60 Minutes" journalistic review is concluded, and we are implementing ongoing changes based on its results," said CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair, not making clear what those changes were.
The "60 Minutes" piece relied on testimony by Dylan Davies, a security official who was given a pseudonym in the report. The newsmagazine believed his account that he was at the scene even after informing CBS that he told his employers that he wasn't there — something that Ortiz said should have raised a "red flag" about his story.
A few days later, The Washington Post said that Davies had filed a report with his employer, Blue Mountain, that he was at his villa on the night of the attack and not at the mission. CBS went back to Davies, who insisted he had been at the attack scene and had told that to the FBI, so Fager defended the "60 Minutes" story.
A week later, The New York Times reported that Davies had told the FBI that he was not on the scene. Within hours, CBS confirmed the Times story, which was later corroborated by a State Department source, and said that a correction would be issued.
Ortiz said the FBI report "was knowable before the ('60 Minutes') piece aired." He said Logan and McLellan did not tap wider resources at CBS to try and track this information down. Ortiz mentioned no names, but CBS News reporter John Miller is a former law enforcement official with deep sources in the community.
Ortiz said that Logan's claims that al-Qaida carried out the attack and controlled the hospital in Benghazi "were not adequately attributed in the report."
Logan's Chicago speech in October 2012 before the city's Better Government Association urged the U.S. to take action in response to Benghazi. Ortiz said it represents a conflict to take a public position on Benghazi and do the "60 Minutes" report.
Ortiz said CBS also erred in not acknowledging that Davies' book telling his Benghazi story, which has been pulled from the shelves, was published by a fellow CBS Corp. company. In correcting the report, CBS had already made note of this oversight.
Ortiz's report also said that questions have been raised about the authenticity of photos in the report, including one that displayed the schedule of the U.S. ambassador killed in the attack. Ortiz said those photos appear to be genuine.
"When faced with such an error, we must use it as an opportunity to make our broadcast even stronger," Fager wrote to his staff. "We are making adjustments at '60 Minutes' to reduce the chances of it happening again."
Congressional Republicans have insisted that the Obama administration misled Americans about the Benghazi attack, playing down a terrorist assault in the heat of the presidential campaign. Five GOP-led House committees have investigated, demanding documents and witnesses from the administration while complaining that the Obama team has been stonewalling.
A day after the CBS report, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he would block President Barack Obama's nominees for Federal Reserve chairman and Homeland Security chief until the administration allowed survivors of the assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission to talk to members of Congress.
The liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America had attacked CBS' Benghazi report from the start. The group's founder, David Brock, said he had urged appropriate action and "the network has done that. We hope this serves as a lesson learned to CBS about the danger of misinformation."
Online: https://www.cbsnews.com


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(31 July 2013 – Toronto, ON)– STARS DANCE, the fourth studio album from multi-platinum recording artist, Selena Gomez, has today debuted at #1 on the Canadian Nielson Soundscan chart, selling 16,500 copies in its first week. STARS DANCE, released July 23 through Universal Music Canada, the country's leading music company, is Selena's first #1 debut in Canada and features Selena's double-platinum hit single "Come & Get It", as well as her most recent single, "Slow Down". Internationally,STARS DANCE debuted at # 1 in 28 countries and top 10 in 84 countries on iTunes.
The road to # 1 kicked off in April with the release of Selena's first single from STARS DANCE, "Come & Get It". The video for the single will hit the 100 million view mark next week, and was recently nominated for MTV's 2013 Video Music Awards for Best Pop Video. A week prior to release, iTunes offered a global stream of Selena's STARS DANCE following an online marketing campaign which enabled Selena's fans to unlock previews of the album.
Selena is set to launch her world-wide tour on August 14 in Canada's own Vancouver, BC. Additional Canadian tour dates will follow in Lethbridge, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. For Selena tour updates, go to www.selenagomez.com
In the states, Gomez, who just turned 21 last week, is also the youngest solo female artist to hit No. 1 since her friend Taylor Swift in 2010. On the chart dated Nov. 13 of that year, the then-20-year old Swift debuted at the top with her second leader, "Speak Now."
The album also debuted at #1 in Mexico! Selena has done something none of her peers have, hit #1 in America, Canada & Mexico at once!


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It was a grey January day in St Petersburg in 1878 when Vera Zasulich, a young nihilist, made the short journey to the office of the city's governor, General Fyodor Trepov. Here the general listened to petitions and examined complaints. A crowd of people had gathered in the cold. Zasulich waited in line for her turn to approach the great man. At last they spoke, and just as Trepov was turning from her to deal with the next supplicant, she pulled a gun from under her cloak and fired at him at point-blank range. The bullet burst into his pelvis, wounding but not killing him. Zasulich threw down the gun, stood quite still, and waited to be arrested. They beat her, of course, and then bundled her into a room, and then wondered a little feebly what to do with her next.
As they deliberated in the immediate aftermath of her deed, Zasulich moved from moments of dissociation and strangeness to an honest desire to offer advice to her baffled captors. Her words are quoted in a collection of revolutionary-era Russian memoirs, Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar, edited by Barbara Alpern Engel and Clifford N Rosenthal:
My foresight, and consequently my precise plan of action, did not extend beyond the moment of attack. But every minute my joy increased – not because I was in full control of myself . . . but rather because I found myself in an extraordinary state of the most complete invulnerability, such as I had never before experienced. Nothing at all could confuse me, annoy me, or tire me. Whatever was being thought up by those men, at that time conversing animatedly in another corner of the room, I would regard them calmly, from a distance they could not cross.
This mingled feeling of elation and satisfaction appears often in the personal accounts of assassins; the work has been done and, in the process, their own lives thrown away. A sudden liberation from the burden of self fills them; they ascend to a height above life. They have realised themselves in the perfection of a deed.
Zasulich's act succeeded by virtue of its comparative failure. Her shooting of Trepov was an act of revenge, after he had ordered an innocent man to be badly whipped in the house of detention on account of a small act of insubordination. Put on trial for her retaliation, she found herself acquitted unexpectedly; indignation against Trepov and sympathy for Zasulich's courage meant only one possible end to the trial, despite the weight of evidence against her. That she had only wounded her man no doubt also facilitated her acquittal.
At the end of the trial, there were wild scenes of jubilation in court. Almost everyone was elated; only the judge and Zasulich were suitably sober. The result depressed the judge, who knew that it made a nonsense of the law, and disheartened Zasulich, who had been deprived of her death. She was confronted by the terrible responsibility of living on; freedom had been returned to her.
Zasulich's state of mind following her attempt at murder is symptomatic of the "archetypal assassin" from the French Revolution onwards, that is, the assassin who struck at a prominent political figure for idealistic and ideological reasons. It illustrates how the results of assassination were perhaps always less vital to the perpetrators than the sheer exhilaration and abandonment central to the deed. There is no question that they also looked for a kind of political "success" in such murders, but in fact such triumphs were always more limited and less vital than the psychological rewards: the desire, in a righteous deed, to justify the self and in the same instant to escape its trammels.
It is doubtful how far assassinations have worked as an instrument of political or revolutionary change. In most cases, such murders have made only a negligible impression on events; the chaos and instability they carry with them have nearly always meant more than the change brought about by the deed.
One of the Great Courses, those DVD lecture series advertised in the New York Review of Books or the LRB, is on Events That Changed History. Two of its 36 defining moments are assassinations – the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and the killing of John F Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. Both events look world-changing, but were they?
The assassination on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo is a textbook example of contingency in historical matters. Along the Appel Quay, where the visiting Austrian archduke, his wife and their entourage were scheduled to drive past, waited seven adolescent assassins, some of them still schoolboys, all determined to kill their man and spark a situation that might lead to Bosnia joining a Greater Serbia. The car swept by, passing the first assassin, who could not act, as a policeman was standing by him in the crowd. The second assassin was more fortunate, and lobbed a nail bomb that landed on the opened bonnet of the car. The archduke swiftly scooped it up and threw it back on to the road, where it exploded as it hit the ground. One soldier was injured by the blast; 70 holes punctured the car. The bomb-thrower bit into a cyanide capsule but the poison was old and its potency was gone. He pushed past the bystanders and leapt over the wall to drown himself. But the summer's heat had shrunk the river, and it was too shallow to drown. Vomiting from the unstable pill, he was pulled down by a throng of people and bundled into the custody of the police. When they asked him if he was a Serb, he replied, "Yes, I am a Serb hero."
Meanwhile the car drove on. The next assassin it passed was moved by pity for the royal pair and failed to fire his gun. The fourth assassin's nerve failed him and he ran off home. The others watched as the car sped past too fast, and the moment was gone. Disappointed, one of the would-be killers, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, feeling hungry now, crossed the Quay and ambled on to the entrance of Franz Joseph Street; there, at Moritz Schiller's food store, he stepped in and bought a sandwich. He was still sitting and eating it when the archduke and duchess pulled up in their car, right outside the store. They were coming back from the city hall and the driver had taken a wrong turning. They tried to reverse, but there was too little room to manoeuvre in the narrow street. Princip stood up, strode over to the right hand of the vehicle and, from a distance of four or five paces, fired two shots directly into the car. The first one killed the archduke; the second, intended for Oskar Potiorek, the governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, fatally wounded the duchess.
Some still believe that this product of accident and misadventure sparked a world war that killed millions. It is the case that some schoolboys playing the role of doomed heroes helped topple a civilisation; yet, on a grander political scale, the murder was very largely only a pretext for action. There had been brutal assassinations before. Such murders usually occurred within the body politic of a sovereign state, as an element in a coup or an outcome of insanity. By their transnational nature, the numerous anarchist murders from the 1880s to the 1900s offered no foreign country as a suitable target for retaliation; like the pirate, the anarchist was equally an enemy everywhere. As the assassins operated outside the boundaries of the nation state, the vengeance of armed retribution was meaningless in relation to the horrors of their actions. The murders in Sarajevo were entirely different. They occurred on Hapsburg soil but could easily be said to have their origin in the very existence of the Serbian state. The response to the killings potentially involved war – yet such a confrontation was always avoidable as long as everyone wanted peace.
However, far from aspiring to avert a war, the Austrians did all they could to invite it. The Austrian foreign minister, Count Berchtold, wrongly believed, or chose to believe, that the murders in Sarajevo had been carried out with the connivance of the Serbian government. With German backing, the Austrians were disposed to pick a fight. They thought they could bully the Serbs with impunity and quickly crush an upstart neighbour. They pressed for war, but even so meant only to settle scores with Serbia, a smaller enemy whose certain defeat would bolster the empire; they never intended the European conflagration that would burn down their power.
None of the young conspirators imagined that the assassination would provoke immediate war between Serbia and Austria; as for their deed sparking a worldwide conflict, it was beyond their powers to conceive such an outcome. Nedeljko Cabrinovic, the youth who threw the nail bomb at the car, lamented that "if I had foreseen what was to happen I should myself have sat down on the bombs so as to blow myself to bits". Though he toughed it out in court, in private Princip was devastated by reports of the war. Yet, later, he could hardly believe that a world war could have followed on from their choices; he couldn't really feel guilty for that bit of bad luck. They had aimed at a symbol, the embodiment of all their frustrations. They were too young and too naive to grasp fully the potential consequences of their actions; they were in love with the heroic deed, and their bloodily rose-tinted imaginations could not picture anything beyond that fair vision: at the trial, Cabrinovic remarked, "We thought that only noble characters are capable of committing assassinations." Their most pressing motive in murdering the archduke and his wife was the desire to share in that nobility.
The "world-changing" consequences of the events in Sarajevo depended on the context in which the murders happened. The world was poised for war, and so the killings led to carnage. The deed resonated within the desires of others, and just then what others wanted was what they imagined would be the speedy resolution of questions of European dominance and prestige. If it had not been Sarajevo that pulled the trigger, it would have been something else, but war would have come in any case.
If assassination's potency to alter history is questionable in Sarajevo, there must be even greater doubts in the case of the killing of John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963. Kennedy had mastered the new politics, offering charisma to the electorate. His final place in the national consciousness was as a symbol of all that was most desirable in the American myth. In terms of tangible achievement or foreign policy gains, however, he left almost nothing for posterity; at best, he founded the Peace Corps. The great legislative triumphs of the period, in civil rights, Medicaid, environmental law and social welfare, are all attributable to the much-disparaged and untelegenic Lyndon Baines Johnson.
In the cruellest interpretation, the single most important impact of Kennedy's career is that his death handed Johnson, as his successor, the moral force to pass these necessary reforms – laws that Kennedy would have been unlikely to get through undamaged on his own. In foreign policy terms, it was almost certainly Kennedy's weakness with Khrushchev that prompted the Cuban missile crisis, the resolution of which was his only victory. Even that success was not quite what the public perceived it to be, involving as it did the hushed-up quid pro quo removal of US missiles from Turkey. Meanwhile, Kennedy had already sparked an arms race with the Russians, and his policy on Vietnam helped to create the conditions for the disastrous war that followed. There were hints that he would have withdrawn from Vietnam if he had been re-elected; and later there were other hints that he had been murdered precisely because of this private intention.
To imagine that Kennedy could have ended the Vietnam war presupposes a strength of purpose in him of which there was little evidence in the first years of his presidency, other than the brinkmanship of the missile crisis and (on a much smaller scale) his confrontation with George Wallace over racial integration. In any case, Kennedy had fatally undermined the Diem regime in South Vietnam, with consequences that would have precluded such a sudden withdrawal. Otherwise, he inspired and launched the space programme – and that was about all.
Despite this paltry legacy, Kennedy still stands in the eyes of many as a "great president", even one of the greatest. This owes more to marketing than delivery. Knowing that his Catholicism would prevent a straightforward coronation by the Democratic Party, he was forced to fight the 1960 election campaign on the basis of his national popularity. He had to win primaries and show his power. It was a new kind of strategy, and it hinged on the retailing of Kennedy. They were going to "sell Jack like soap flakes".
On 26 September 1960, Kennedy triumphed over Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, on television; radio listeners were more evenly divided on who they believed had won the debate. On the screen, JFK had looked like a superstar, and the sweating, stubbly Nixon, as one journalist put it, "a real middle-class uneducated swindler with all the virtues of a seller of fountain pens in Naples". The smear on the Democratic posters – "Would YOU buy a used car from this man?" – stuck. The Kennedys' relationship with the press and with television, their youth, their attractiveness, placed them in a position of mediated confidence with the electorate. However, it was the faux-intimacy of the television image, the allure of cinema. In 1960, in an article for Esquire, Norman Mailer put it like this:
Since the First World War Americans have been living a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull . . . and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation . . . if elected he would not only be the youngest president ever to be chosen by the voters, he would be the most conventionally attractive young man ever to sit in the White House, and his wife – some would claim it – might be the most beautiful first lady in our history. Of necessity the myth would emerge once more, because America's politics would now be also America's favourite movie, America's first soap opera, America's bestseller.
The Kennedys were stars, and John F Ken – nedy died on-screen. The assassination was an experience broadcast on television; two days later Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was shown live by NBC across homes in America. Within half an hour of the JFK shooting, 68 per cent of Americans had heard the news, carried to them by the media. The television set that brought the outside world into the domestic space displayed the pathos to a nation. All could feel involved; the deed became an image.
Yet it was an image that could not be assimilated or understood. In one sense, apart from the tragedy of a young man's murder, it was precisely its lack of historical significance that rendered it so potent. The plethora of conspiracy theories around Kennedy's murder responded to genuine mysteries and unresolved problems in the story; the theories were also a way to inscribe meaning into the event, as though an unseen betrayal underwrote it, and they might produce the simulacra of significance. For, just as the assassinations of the 1960s were often assumed to be manifestations of a vague "climate of violence", so it was that their significance lay chiefly in their effect on American mentalities – even, as Mailer suggests, on the dream life of the nation. It was not the political consequences of Kennedy's murder, nor indeed all the various assassinations of that decade, that truly mattered, but rather the way they sustained and exemplified an atmosphere of panic, or of social disintegration. They worried Americans with a sense of things falling apart, of a polis under strain.
In the eyes of many, political violence, random killings and unrest seemed a constant factor in American life from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. As the journalist Jack Newfield wrote: "We felt, by the time we reached 30, that we had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated." The folk singer Dick Holler's 1968 song "Abraham, Martin and John" links the deaths of Lincoln, JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. It presents the four men as simple embodiments of goodness who were not allowed to live out their potential.
In America losing those individuals, irreparable damage was done to the possibilities of national political life. Other people failed to do what the man who was killed might have done. Similarly the history of assassination depends in two senses on the centrality of the individual: in the idea of the "indispensable person" who is assassination's chosen victim, and in the fantasy that such murders gift their perpetrators with an undying, if ignoble fame.
Though there is a great deal of force to Newfield's lament, the idea of the "indispensable person" runs counter to the strengths and resilience of democratic life. The American mood in the late 1960s was one of intense unease; and yet the fabric of social and political life held good. The anarchists who struck at presidents, monarchs or high-ranking officials were sometimes engaged in personal attacks, their killings a move in an ongoing vendetta between the government and revolutionaries. More usually they were simply aiming at the office itself: in their own judgement, murdering a symbol and not a person. Yet, seen as such, the deed was meaningless. The president was killed and another president took his place. The structures of power were always designed to take into account the fact of mortality, to maintain continuity; that death should be caused by an assassin's gun altered little.
Even in the case of the many assassination attempts directed against Adolf Hitler, it is doubtful whether striking their target would have altered events significantly. Hitler's would be assassins were as much involved in making a gesture, an indication of the survival of an internal opposition, as attempting to decapitate the Third Reich. Success would probably have led to succession by another, equally wicked Nazi. Where assassins did succeed in killing a leading Nazi – with the murder of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 – the murder, for all its justice, merely prompted horrible reprisals, notably the massacres in the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Meanwhile, the "architect of the Holocaust" may have been killed, but the Final Solution continued apace.
In modern times, with very few exceptions (such as the killing of Abraham Lincoln in 1865), assassination has been a sideshow – although, I would argue, a highly significant one. Assassination has often been linked to a kind of "secret history", contained in the romance of conspiracy theories. It seems instead that assassination belongs to another kind of concealed history – the history, in Norman Mailer's terms, of the dream life of the west.
The assassins of the past 200 years were besotted with action, the power of deeds. It was part of the thrill of such action that no one could foresee to what it would lead. Killing was sufficient, even without the understanding of its consequences. Indeed, practical results were the last thing sought for by any assassin. For assassination long ago broke free of any idea of efficacy or political influence, and instead became the central expression of the extremists' taste for action as such – a pure deed that annihilates both the victim and the perpetrator, even as it depends on the target's fame and the fame and attention that it grants to the killer. It is an act of self-assertion that is simultaneously a self-negation.
In one respect, the historical importance of Zasulich's action was limited: Trepov survived and the autocracy continued. However, as a muse of murder she proved a vital figure, her deed provoking attempts against the kaiser in Germany and arousing a broad campaign of assassinations in Russia which led to the murder of the tsar himself. Zasulich's example was crucial in this swing towards the practice of terror. She was an inspiration to crime. A police official was murdered in Kiev in the spirit of emulation, and when in August 1878 a young man called Sergei Kravchinskii executed General Nikolai Mezentsev on the streets of St Petersburg, he was consciously following the line set by the courageous Zasulich.
For most within the movement, the heightening of stakes seemed inevitable and just. And yet, for Zasulich herself, there was no such easy acceptance of the killings. Soloviev's infamous attempt to assassinate the tsar with a bomb at the Winter Palace in 1879 merely depressed her. As years went by, Zasulich's position grew clearer. The assassin's deed was without revolutionary merit. It led not to great social changes, but only to an ineffectual puff of violence. It exhilarated other revolutionaries, who sensed vicariously and inappropriately the retort of power. Conversely, it dismayed and sickened potential supporters among the masses, or rendered them passive spectators of outrage. The people were not roused to rebel by such deeds, but became mere witnesses to others' glorious, or infamous, violence. Worst of all was terror's dependence upon a sickly illusion in the mind of the assassin herself.
Zasulich knew this at first hand. The assassin worked in a spirit of vanity or anomie: either conceited by an impression of their own potency or buoyed by the awareness of their own insignificance. The assassin embraced their victim's death and their own, and both inspirited them with the weightless emancipation from the burden of having to live at all. Zasulich's act of terror had sought to publicise another's brutality; the danger was that such acts would only advertise their own horror. The injustice that prompted them would be forgotten in the impact of the assassin's bullet. It was, she might have realised, only her own incompetence, in merely hitting Trepov in the hip, that had permitted her deed to appear noble.
Michael Newton is the author of "Age of Assassins" (Faber & Faber, £25)


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Usain Bolt, a young 6'-5" Jamaican got a perfect start and with a helping tailwind just under the legal limit, set a new world's record in the men's 100 meter dash over the weekend at 9.72 seconds. It's the 14th time the world record has been set or equaled since electronic timing was introduced at the 1968 Olympics (all by men of West African descent, of course).
West Indians appear to be increasingly dominating sprinting, as African Americans lose interest in a sport that was very good to them in the 20th century. Between the Wars, black colleges switched from baseball to track as their big spring sport because tracks' results were objective. Grambling wasn't allowed to play LSU in baseball (or anything else), but Grambling sprinters could compete with LSU sprinters in the newspapers when their times were published.
But African Americans have been concentrating on just football and basketball in recent decades, with anything else considered fit only for athletes of dubious masculinity who don't like contact sports, such as Carl Lewis.
Track and field could use a decade or so without any new world records. In the women's 100m, nobody has come close to the late Florence Griffith-Joyner's 10.49 seconds in the 100m and 21.34 in the 200m in 20 years, which is a good thing.
Or he just might be juiced to the gills.
You can usually get an idea by looking to see if the upper body is ridiculously over-developed. But there aren't that many pictures of Bolt online yet and he seems to wear a rather non-form-fitting jersey, so it's hard to tell. Lots of juicehead sprinters make it easy for you to guess by wearing skimpy jerseys and frequently stripping them off in front of cameras to reveal their Mr. Universe torsos. (Here's 2004 200m Olympic gold medalist Shawn Crawford, who has never failed a drug test, but still ...) In contrast, after Barry Bonds started hitting the juice in 1999, he always wore rather shapeless long-sleeved jerseys buttoned to the neck. Barry is a jerk, but he's not stupid.
In 2004, 18-year-old Allyson Felix from LA, then a slip of a girl with no arm muscle definition at all, ran a ladylike 22.18 in the 200 meters for a silver medal at the Athens Olympics. That was cheering. I could envision her running similar times for three more Olympics and winning a bundle of medals without any suspicion of doping. She's a fine young lady, who just graduated from USC a couple of weeks ago despite not having a track scholarship because she's been running professionally for four years.
But in 2007, Felix ran a 21.81, the only time 22 seconds has been broken by a woman since it was done in 2000 by Marion Jones, who is now in prison. Women ran 200m in under 22 seconds 78 times from 1979 through 2000, but only Felix has done it in the last 7 years. Felix now has got more muscular arms, although hardly in the class of, say, Gail Devers in the old days. I'd feel better about her if she wasn't from LA, where a lot of bad stuff involving sprinters and doping has happened, and hadn't left her old coach Patt Connolly (coach of Evelyn Ashford, sometimes said to be the fastest clean women ever) for Flo-Jo's old coach Bobby Kersee.
The men's 200m times show more progression, although hopefully nobody will threaten Michael Johnson's 19.32 at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Women's running was just hit harder by synthetic male hormones up through 2000 because women get a bigger bang for their buck from them.
By the way, the 1993 and 1997 Chinese National Games were festivals of doping with lots of silly women's world records being set. The official website of the Chinese Olympic Committee still boasts: "At the Games, five of its runners surpassed the world records in the 1500m, 3000m and 10000m on 13 occasions." Yeah, sure. That was another reason I didn't understand why the Olympics were given to Beijing instead of Paris.
And the Chinese really want to win the most gold medals in Beijing in 2008. I imagine they don't want to disgrace themselves at home either by getting caught.
So, will the Chinese do the right thing or do the wrong thing?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer


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Hewitt Pissed Off at Three 6 Mafia?
TMZ has learned that the rap group Three 6 Mafia was booted from their home after a member of their entourage peed on Jennifer Love Hewitt's lawn.
The Oscar-winning rap group recently moved into the same Toluca Lake neighborhood of the busty "Ghost Whisperer," and marked their new territory by having one of their assistants relieve himself on Hewitt's front yard. The group's new reality show, "Adventures in HollyHood," premieres tomorrow night on MTV. While handing out invitations to the Three 6 Mafia housewarming party, you can actually see the assistant peeing on a lawn they claim belongs to the actress. Must pee TV!
Instead of offering the group gifts, Hewitt and other neighbors forced them to move out of the Toluca Lake 'hood, and they're now living in Bel Air. Sounds like an upgrade, minus the view of Hewitt's spectacular cleavage.


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Size: Bigger than 9 Earths across
Number of moons:
Temperature: -292°F. So Saturn is REALLY cold!
Saturn is mainly made of gas and liquid, with a small rocky core.
Saturn is the 6th planet from the Sun. It is a giant planet. Saturn has beautiful rings. Saturn is gold, brown, and white. Its rings are gold, brown, white, red, yellow and green.
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